Data : Salon XXV

29 October 2014, 19:00 - 22:00

JOSÉE BROUILLARD

MITCHELL STAFIEJ

ROBERT FEULNER

In FOUND, Mitchell Stafiej and Robert Feulner start with a film and transform it, giving it new dimensions: a simultaneously voyeuristic and alienating experience. The film, which functions as the piece’s source material, brings us into intimate moments in the lives of several individuals, all of whom were close to a person who was killed a year before the film was made. The film’s source material is emotionally wrenching, at times disturbing; its VHS format connects us to our memory, enhancing the impression of the past, the personal, the familiar. Robert Feulner scrambles and transforms this visual material while Mitchell Stafiej incorporates new sounds into the videos. Their finished products are then combined with the raw material of the original film, giving life to a new aesthetic, new emotional dimensions, and creating contradictions and juxtapositions that are at once surprising and moving.

Video sequences for a prepared monitor is a video installation that alters your perception of space. Plunged into total darkness, the spectator encounters video images of a moving body. The fragments of the body emerge, separate, from the depths, rendering it impossible to distinguish the surface of the screen or even sense the size of the room. The spectator and the video body are both totally lost in the immersive darkness, relating to one another in their disorientation. The onscreen body becomes the spectator’s only means of spatial awareness. Occasionally, the spectator perceives the video image at a great distance, creating the impression of a large and open space; at other times the image will appear from an almost invasively close distance, constraining the space.